Julie Robotham

WHEN Janice Stewart's type 1 diabetes was diagnosed in 1965, "they still had glass syringes. I'd hear Mum boiling them up and I'd think, 'Oh no."'

Now the 55-year-old northern beaches woman has become the first person in the world whose own body has resumed long-term production of insulin after a graft of "islet" cells from the pancreas of a deceased donor.

The procedure has given hope to researchers that newly diagnosed children in future may be able to live free of the tyranny of daily injections.

It was a technical victory only, said Bernie Tuch, the doctor who infused the cells - encapsulated in an anti-rejection coating derived from seaweed - into Ms Stewart's abdominal cavity. The insulin her body still generates two years after the procedure is in tiny quantities, insufficient to make any difference to her condition or its treatment.

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But it proved the concept worked and was safe, said Dr Tuch. Ms Stewart and three other patients, whose grafts stopped working sooner, experienced only minimal side effects and had not required anti-rejection drugs. Scar tissue that formed around the pellets might be avoided in future by refining the surface of the implants.

The capsules had pores large enough to let insulin filter out but too small to let immune cells in, preventing rejection, said Dr Tuch, who is the former director of the diabetes transplantation unit at Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney and a director of the Australian Foundation for Diabetes Research.

The challenge now is to develop embryonic stem-cell technology to create the insulin-producing islet cells. "You'll never have enough [donor] organs to satisfy the need," Dr Tuch said. About 50 pancreases become available each year after the sudden death of otherwise healthy people, but about 130,000 Australians have type 1 diabetes - in which the body's own insulin-producing cells are killed by an abnormal immune response.

At least one - and up to four - pancreases were required for each recipient, Dr Tuch said, and in common with other transplant procedures had to be harvested immediately after the donor's death because digestive juices quickly degraded them.

Dr Tuch is now working with scientists from the University of Illinois in Chicago to develop the stem-cell technique, which could be ready in four years.

The partial success of the infusion, published in the journal Diabetes Care, comes after Living Cell Technologies in New Zealand last week announced it would begin injecting insulin-producing cells from pigs - with a similar seaweed coating - into diabetes patients in that country. The company has already tried the technique in Russian patients. Porcine transplants might solve the problem of organ supply, said Dr Tuch, but human-derived insulin would always be better for human recipients.

For Ms Stewart, who remains healthy despite the disease, the decision to pioneer the therapy was a gesture of goodwill towards young fellow sufferers, who can suffer irreversible damage to organs and body tissues. "I'm just hopeful there will be a cure," she said yesterday. "It's getting close, I think."